Customers & candidates - Two sides of the same coin

Gerry Crispin is the Principal & Co-Founder of CareerXroads, a member-driven peer-to-peer platform for TA Leaders that focuses on what keeps them up at night and what they are doing about it now. A world-renowned talent acquisition guru, Gerry is also the founder of TalentBoard, a non-profit and also conducts CareerXRoads’ annual studies on Source of Hire, Candidate Experience and Evolving Referral Practices which act as global benchmarks in the talent acquisition and HR community.

CareerXroads was a commercial company – a consultancy that was devoted to understanding the impact of emerging technologies on recruiting. We wrote 8 books from 1996-2003 detailing the pros and cons of the technology tools, resources and strategies employers were using to acquire, screen, select and onboard Talent. We also consulted with numerous firms and eventually built a peer-to-peer community for Talent Acquisition leaders that currently numbers about 100 large firms.

The founding of non-profit, Talent Board, in 2010 by myself, Elaine Orler, Talent Function and Ed Newman, Phenom People was a result of our belief that it was time to help identify employers trying to improve their candidate experience rather than castigate those doing a poor job or satisfied with doing nothing. Talent Board’s mission is to define and measure the underlying value of candidate experience as a compelling business necessity. Keeping Talent Board a non-profit allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in the world, engages a greater number of companies to participate and allows for a broader distribution of our results than a commercial firm whose agenda might be questioned. 

If one talked about candidate experience fifteen years ago, people used to laugh. People couldn’t imagine treating candidates differently from the way they already did. Two things certainly changed that. One was the rise of social media which apparently is still rising to this day and its role in amplifying the voice of the candidates. And the second, which is more important in my opinion, was the concept of Net Promoter Score, which was first introduced in an article written by Frederick F. Reichheld for Harvard Business Review wherein he talked about the importance of customer perception. That particular article started an extraordinary discussion on how customers affect us in our businesses and that continues till this day. I extended that discussion to candidates. What that article has done is that it has taught us (in Human Resources) what our marketing colleagues have been doing and it has gotten us to think about how we measure, define and understand relationships, changing attitudes and changing behaviors of our customers – i.e. candidates. 

Companies can create a differentiated candidate experience by focusing on these five things – expectations, perception of fairness, closure, holding recruiters accountable, and being able to listen and demonstrate. These things help in improving candidate experience. 

Let’s take the examples of expectations and perception of fairness and how they impact candidate experience. Visualize a customer who has come at a diner. The expectation is to get a great customer service by the wait staff, and if (s)he doesn’t get it, it is a possibility (s)he wouldn’t sit there. Some people expect the order to be delivered within 30 minutes, and if it isn’t, people actually leave. Juxtapose this argument of expectations of customers to the expectations of candidates. If you do not deliver in accordance with the candidate’s expectations, you will be rated less. These expectations about the process of recruiting are benchmarked with the best in the industry. Moreover, we also see technologies help employers set those expectations more effectively, for instance, through Instagram, mapping, video, through all kinds of tools that are available out there.

 Another critical point is around the fairness of perception. Suppose you discover at the diner that you weren’t served in 30 minutes, but someone else was. It is going to have a negative impact. Translating this into a candidate scenario, the perception of fairness about the recruiting process is an absolute critical component of how you build and design the tools, the information and the openness and transparency towards the candidates.

One of the things we have found is that not only is there a host of areas in which candidates will rate you less, but there are several areas in which they will rate you more. We have discovered that that those companies that are willing to have their last question of the application to be, “What didn’t I ask you about your skills knowledge and experience that you would like to share with us now that makes you more competitive in this job?" positively influence the perception of fairness about their selection process.

Customer service skills are critical. However, for all the elements that make the treatment of candidates and customers similar, there is one huge difference. Customers are served – they are able to purchase the product nearly 99 percent of the time if they have the qualification that is, money, etc. With candidates, it is the reverse. 99 percent never get the job. Handling rejection is an important but minor skill in customer service. The treatment of candidates requires real mastery of how to handle rejection. Those skills are seldom taught to recruiters. In the future, systems and cognitive programs will mimic these capabilities.

In the 2015 study, we had 200 employers who participated from the US, a 100 in EMEA and another 55 in Asia Pacific. The companies that participated sent the data of all their candidates (a total of 150,000 candidate responses) and a benchmark of 50 companies that were rated the highest was created. The candidate responses were obtained, looked at, and analyzed. It is one of the biggest collaboration of companies that we know of, and we are producing data for their benefit. 

Here are some of my observations relative to that data. We asked the candidates how likely they were to apply again, and what we learned was that if they had a positive experience, 62 percent said they were willing to apply again. If they had a negative experience, a quarter of them said they would never apply again. We then asked the candidates how likely they were to refer someone in the future. 78 percent of the candidates with positive experience said they would actively encourage others to apply, but if they had a negative experience, 40 percent would go out of their way and discourage others to apply. Calculating the cost it will have to the business is also not difficult to determine; it is pretty straight forward. Another interesting finding that was uncovered was that about 25 percent of those candidates who had a bad experience would discontinue all relations with the organization.

We see the influence of candidates also expanding in their inner circles. 80 percent of candidates would share the positive experience, and 65 percent would share the negative experience. This has doubled in three years’ time. Publicly, 51 percent would share a positive experience and a third would share a negative experience.  

What is counterintuitive is that millennials are less likely to share a negative experience – they have been coached not to burn bridges; on the other hand, the baby boomers don't care anymore so they share negative experiences a lot more. 

We asked 20 of our 5000 finalists if they were asked for feedback about the process, 60 percent said no. When a candidate is not selected, nearly 60 percent receive an email from a do-not-reply address notifying them. In this group, only 20 percent of the candidates never got any response from the employer. This makes speed of response the key. We find that the longer you take to inform the candidates that they did not get the position, the lower your rating will drop and it will affect you in the long run. We also are able to show high correlations in terms of holding recruiters accountable for the candidate experience. The more you do that, the higher your ratings are.  

Take the example of Hilton. One of the things they did was invest significantly in a small group of candidates from around the world. They engaged in a white glove treatment of all the candidates and what they discovered was that over the following year, the candidates that they did not hire spent another 130 million dollars with Hilton as the hotel chain’s customers. This is a powerful example which highlights the cost of doing it poorly and the reward of doing it well.

Hilton set expectations and delivered on them, listened intently at every stage of the recruiting process, asked for and gave specific feedback to help candidates identify openings in other firms and tips to compete more effectively for those jobs, held recruiters accountable for the candidates experience and informed candidates not going forward in the process as soon as it was determined they would not compete. Everyone not hired in this pilot group was given a ‘gold’ card which allowed the candidate future discounts when staying at Hilton. 

(The interview has been extracted from the excerpts from Gerry Crispinís keynote speech at TechHRí16 Conference held on the 4th and 5th oF August)